He Dropped Three Women in One Night, Then We Took His Estate novel · Chapter 14 of 32

Chapter 14: The Table

The dinner started well and ended in a quarrel, which Calista had half expected.

The banker's witness mark on the Earl's paper had sat unspoken in the house all day, because nobody knew yet what to do with it.

Ottilie had cooked, and for once nothing was burnt.

She had made a pie with a lattice top and carried it in on a board, to applause.

Then Elowen said, quite mildly, "So we have all been hiding the same paper for a fortnight."

The room changed.

Calista put down her fork.

"We settled that," she said. "We know who wrote them."

"We know who wrote the papers," said Ottilie. "We haven't said what they did."

"I don't want to say it."

"I do."

Ottilie set down her knife.

Under the lamp her face was tired and handsome and very much the face of a woman about to give a speech she had rehearsed.

"For a fortnight," she said, "I thought the woman at the head of this table closed my playhouse. I thought she signed it with a pen I'd watched her use for my rent receipt. I thought she sat at her own stove and watched me sing, and said nothing."

"I did not close your playhouse," said Calista.

"I know that now. But I still sat through it. Every night, I put my head on a pillow and thought, she has taken my theatre and my people, and she feeds me soup."

"I did not know."

"I'm not blaming you," Ottilie said. "I'm telling you what it was like. It was the worst fortnight of my life, including the year my father died. I never want it back."

She turned to Elowen.

"Now you."

Elowen was sitting very straight.

"I thought you both sold me," she said. "I thought the two of you had talked it over, in the study, with your tea, and decided I was in the way. The mistress and the wife, who couldn't agree on anything else, agreed on me."

Her voice was thin and exact.

"I am used to being handled. I know what it looks like. Nobody in that house ever asked me a question without already knowing the answer. And I came here, and you were kind, and I thought: of course they are. A girl who might scream in the night is easier to manage if you feed her."

"Elowen," said Calista.

"I did not mean you managed me. I meant it is what I believed."

"I know," Calista said.

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